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Dear Rob,
I've written an open letter to you over on my WordPress Blog. The post in question is here:
http://wp.bluescrap.com/2006/07/24/an-open-letter-to-robert-labatt-ceo-ezboard-inc/
I'll look forward to your reply soonest.
Yours sincerely,
Richard
...I'd fit right in with Yuku.
Yes, one of the few bits of ezboard actually migrated across properly to Yuku appears to be the going back in time bug. Good to see the Yuku developers have managed to port that bug over to the new platform.
Lots of reports on the Yuku Help [sic] forums - the ones where, post-Yuku "help" policy implementation, you hardly ever see a Yuku employee - from people with disappearing posts, people having to post new threads to bring back hidden ones, etc.
Oh and take a look at the view and reply counts. Yes, they're all wrong as well! Well, at least they start that way, then they change...
As usual with those external hyperlinks to Yuku, you're advised to click and go and do something else for a while until they load.
...or so it appears. And yet more evidence of "misleading statements" or "factual inaccuracies" from ezboard.
So the plan today was to look at yesterday's post about the $4,172 price for a Gold community and do a table to compare prices and features of a phpBB forum and a vBulletin forum hosted with DreamHost with what "The Clayboard" had paid to use ezboard and were likely to pay when that board is migrated over to Yuku.
Now the reason I'd originally used the Clayboard as an example was that according to Big Boards, it was one of the largest ezboards. I'd followed the links to the other main ezboards listed and found that some of them had deserted ezboard - understandably so - or didn't have a link showing through to their Community Chest details.
Then it occurred to me that if I manipulated the URL for the Clayboard's Community Chest (or used elements from it), I could get the information I was after. Which was when I made some interesting discoveries...
Now a while back, on 24 March 2006, an ezboard employee made a categorical statement in reply to a suggestion that "one extremely large and popular board on ezboard was promised free gold for life". ezMish replied that:
"That's totally false."
Another point to consider is that as I noted here, ezboard are now showing adverts on Trial Gold boards. Except that's not the case in all situations...
Anyway, back to the Community Chest URLs. The first board I tried was the JJB board. Now, firstly, you should read this announcement from them, which I'll edit:
"We are now considered a VIP board with R&D (research and development) status.
What does that mean?
We are no longer a typical Gold Community that has to pay to renew our subscription every year...."
So that directly contradicts what ezMish wrote for starters.
Viewing their Community Chest contributions, it seems that JJB has $3,438 in its chest and is currently enjoying an ad-free Gold Trial for free since 24 July 2005.
Moving on to the NikeTalk board that Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc.'s CEO, wrote about in glowing terms in his Yuku "blorum". Here are their Community Chest stats.
Yes, there is a similar entry: 7/24/05 2:57:52 am Purchased "Gold Trial" for $0.00
They still have $2,333 in their chest despite an $1100 withdrawal by "Anonymous" on 12 January 2005.
I've left the best until last: Survivor Sucks. Here are their Community Chest stats.
Yet again, their last "purchase" was a Gold Trial for $0.00 on 24 July 2005. Of more interest is what's left in the kitty: just $31. Why? Well because "-Anonymous-" withdrew $7,943 on 3 April 2006, just two days after their "Holy of Holies" started this thread entitled "How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Yuku".
Interesting stuff, eh? You draw your own conclusions from this; I already have. I'm sure there's nothing untoward or underhand going on.
...get out of the Yuku.
Well I suppose it had to happen eventually. Yes, after 8 days of inactivity despite his role as "Customer Support Lead" at Yuku, ckerr has finally made a post on the Yuku Help [sic] forums.
That would be to provide some customer support then? Er, no. It's applying the same "shut up and go away" mentality they previously applied to ezboard's Help [sic] forums. Here's the policy (as usual for Yuku, click the link, go away and make a coffee and it might have loaded when you get back).
I particularly liked this bit:
"This policy is necessary to ensure that users receive help from fellow Yuku users or Yuku Moderators in a timely manner."
I agree: it would be an improvement to see Yuku Moderators providing assistance in a timely manner (or at all).
Oh and of interest is this choice of wording for what Yuku is:
"...the Yuku profiling and message board products."
So there we are. Yuku is officially two separate products with a common name: a replacement for ezboard and a lame attempt to jump on the MySpace bandwagon...
Or at least, that's how ezboard sees it. You see, part of the issue with ezboard is that every ezboard community is hosted on shared servers and what one board does affects the rest.
How so? Well take this post in the ezboard Help [sic] Forums. Apparently, one board's members are seeing connection timeouts and delays and have seen fit to complain.
The cause of their problems? Another board on the same server that has the "who's online" feature enabled.
The solution? ezboard will see if they will turn that feature off!
Bearing in mind ezboard's charges for Gold communities and how cheap servers are these days, there's really no excuse for this at all. Clearly ezboard, Inc. are setting profit before customer experience.
After all, if one of the larger boards on the server being complained about paid $4,172 in January, don't they deserve their own server?
What's truly mind boggling is what they get for their $4,172 a year. Just look at this graphic:
20GB of web space and 1TB of bandwidth a month. For $7.95 a month. And those limits increase every week! Oh, and the icing on the cake is that they offer "One-Click Installs" of phpBB forum software so even the excuse that people aren't comfortable installing forum software doesn't really wash.
Still no real sign of much Customer Support over on Yuku - even the ezApologists are getting sarky - but in the meantime there are reports from Yuku and ezboard of viruses or worms being detected by Norton:
http://p080.ezboard.com/fezboardfrm87.showMessage?topicID=8521.topic
http://help.yuku.com/forum/viewtopic/id/2969
Not the first time we've seen such reports on ezboard, but it's a first from Yuku.
Before you begin to think that Yuku has finally driven me cuckoo, I should point out that it's not me with the Santa Claus fixation, but ezboard, Inc.
How so? Well if you recall my earlier post, an ezboard staff member had written that they expected ezboard board migrations to be ready to start around the end of 2006. And what elese happens towards the end of the year? Yes, Christmas Day. Wait, wait. Work with me here :)
If you go and read Robert Labatt's CEO Blog written using WordPress, you'll see there that he refers to "ezboard elves".
And the final piece of the jigsaw? Well if you read my piece yesterday about the lack of Customer Support over in the Yuku Help [sic] Forums and then visit those forums, you may notice that one or two ezApologists have been doing all the replies recently and that one of those now (Chris) has a custom usertitle: "yuku helper". So a bit like Santa's Little Helper then?
So there we are: Rob Labatt on his sleigh around Christmas bringing ezboard migrations to the ezboard faithful, all made possible by his elves and supported by his little helpers. A scene to warm the heart! :)
Where have all the Yuku/ezboard Customer Services [sic] staff gone? They must be busy in the Yuku Help [sic] Forum, surely?
After all, a lot of ezboard's customers are asking for support and help over there. So let's see where they are.
"My name is ckerr (aka James). I am the Customer Support Lead here at Yuku and I've been working at ezboard since July 6, 2000."
Last Seen 07/13/06 14:00:21
She's another employee, noted for a terse style...
Last Seen 07/07/06 16:22:55
My mate Jennifer, the one who made unsubstantiated claims about me and wouldn't put up any proof no matter how many times I called her out.
Last Seen 07/11/06 17:36:39
Doesn't appear to know how to update her Yuku profile...
Last Seen 07/13/06 15:53:54
Last Seen 07/03/06 14:19:15
What about Robert Labatt? http://rob.u.yuku.com/
Last Seen 07/14/06 16:06:30
Hurrah! What's Rob been doing? Where's he been helping? Well let's have a look at his most recent post:
Account import notes New Topic 07/07/06
So, as the customers seem to be saying, there's no support and no help from Yuku...
I'm intrigued. An "Important Announcement" has appeared at the top of ezboard communities that the board administrators can choose to show as they see fit. It reads:
"Important ezAnnouncement: Meet your ezboard friends on Yuku and check out their profiles. You'll be amazed with what you can do with the new Yuku profiles. Click here to get your ezboard account into Yuku now!"
Now unless you've been a regular visitor to the ezboard Help [sic] Forums or your community administrator has been keeping you up to date with developments with Yuku originally leaked out by ezboard, you'd probably be wondering what on earth this is all about.
If you go to ezboard's "Important Announcements" forum, you won't see any announcement as to what Yuku is. Only if you go to your Control Center will you see an image inviting you to migrate to Yuku. Or perhaps, you'd need to know about the ezboard CEO's WordPress Blog. That's not a separate post in "Important Announcements", by the way.
So let's look at this announcement again. No clue as to what Yuku is or that ezboards will all be closed down having been forced to migrate to Yuku. No, it's all about user profiles.
If you take a look at Robert Labatt's Yuku profile page you'll see it's a MySpace clone: take a look at Tom Anderson's MySpace profile. Tom Anderson is MySpace's co-founder.
Note that Yuku has copied MySpace in that new registrants to MySpace have Tom added to their friends and as I reported here, Yuku does the same with Labatt and up to nine others. Of course, that's where the comparison ends. Whilst Tom has, at the time of writing, 92,950,935 friends, Rob can only muster 2,282...
So it's clear the direction Yuku is headed. After seeing how well MySpace has done since it started in 2003, ezboard wants a piece of that action by trying to reinvent itself as a MySpace clone. Three years too late...
Maybe that's why the Yuku development emphasis was all about profile pages first, sub-domains next and now finally on message boards?
For those of you wondering about the cost of running a Gold ezboard Community, you might like to have a look at some information from various sources.
ezboard reveals its headline pricing on this page. Now, ezboard's 12 month rates are only available to existing boards renewing so we'll take their basic rate for starters.
This, they say, is $6 per month for 10,000 "Visits/Month". Except it's not. If you read on, you'll see it's actually page views which is much, much different to visits. For instance, to post a message on an ezboard, you'll probably have bookmarked the board home page, so you'll go there (1), then click into the forum you want to post in (2) then compose a new thread (3), then confirm and publish it (4). Four page views as an absolute minimum. Of course, as a Gold Community owner, you don't get access to the actual logs or 'proper' web stats., just the information ezboard chooses to give you.
Let's have a look at an ezboard Gold Community. Let's take for instance the NikeTalk board mentioned in Robert Labatt's Yuku blorum.
Opera tells me that the NikeTalk home page is 15,672 bytes with inline elements of 24,724 bytes which I assume means a total size of 40,396 bytes (39kb). Now NikeTalk is a very popular message board, so I'm just using their home page size as an example.
So if another ezboard with a similar design gets those 10,000 page views a month, the amount of bandwidth consumed will be 10,000 x 39kb = 381MB of bandwidth for which the board owners would pay their $6.
For $10 a month with ezboard, that community gets 25,000 page views, or 952MB of bandwidth (or put another way, less than 1GB of monthly bandwidth). All non-standard images for headers, buttons, etc. and any photos the community wanted to use would have to be stored elsewhere, of course, because ezboard provides a massive zero bytes of storage space. Oh and if the community grew well, they'd notice that after 20 pages of threads, old ones would simply be pruned by ezboard.
Now compare that with, say, DreamHost's $9.95 a month plan. Quite apart from the 20GB of storage (which increases weekly by 160MB), you also get 1TB of bandwidth per month (again growing by 8GB a week). Add an open-source or free message board system and you're away.
Sorry, let me just read that again ... yes, with DreamHost you get 1,024 times as much monthly bandwidth as you get at ezboard.
Yes but wait. ezboard is having to recoup all those startup costs it had when Labatt and his chums at Labrador Ventures took over (we'll obviously have to ignore DreamHost's startup costs). What startup costs? Well, according to an article from Sean Foote at Labrador Ventures (he's a Partner there and is also on the board of directors of ezboard, Inc., so he should know), he quotes Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc,'s CEO as saying:
"When we went to rebuild EZboard, we went with open standards and open source code for some applications and our startup costs were maybe $1,000, not including man hours ... drastically less than the hundreds of thousands of dollars the company had originally spent."
[emphasis added]
Yes, but what about all those servers - surely they must cost a bundle? Well Sean Foote says:
"Though hardware remains the largest expense for companies such as EZboard, servers now cost just $1000, rather than the $10,000 per piece of equipment they commanded in 1999."
Ah but what about all that bandwidth cost? Again, Sean Foote notes that:
"...bandwidth costs are down significantly..."
which probably explains why companies like DreamHost are offering 1,024 times the bandwidth for the same price as ezboard charges.
Now think again about Labatt's "rubber ducky" post in his CEO WordPress Blog. Then consider his claim that in September last year they had 500,000 communities growing at 6,000 communities per month. Now re-acquaint yourself with ezboard's charges per Gold community (not forgetting that non-Gold boards and trial Gold boards all carry paid-for advertising).
I'll leave you with a quote from Robert Labatt:
"Today favors not the first-time entrepreneur or the big VC fund, but the serial entrepreneur or early stage investor who, with a couple hundred thousand dollars or a couple million from well-off friends, can finance a company himself," says Labatt. "It's do-it-yourself entrepreneurship."
A couple of interesting posts and web pages when considered together which follow on from my earlier post "33,000 People Can't Be Wrong" where I considered the way ezboard, Inc. appeared to have ditched the customer surveys they claimed to have done, along with their appearing to have dumped fanfared features such as the promised advertising revenue sharing.
Firstly, there's this post from a very interesting thread about ezboard apparently being linked to an authentication hacking incident. It links through to a Wikipedia article about software development stages.
Secondly, there's the Yuku Feature Voter which requires you to have a Yuku log-in and indeed be able to log-in with it.
Now, if you look at the Wikipedia article where it discusses the pre-alpha stage you'll see it suggests that:
"At this stage designers are still determining exactly what functionalities the product should have."
So it would seem that not only is Yuku not "available today" (as claimed by ezboard, Inc. at DEMOfall 2005), it's not at beta stage (as claimed by ezboard, Inc. subsequently), nor alpha stage (as mentioned by some ezboard employees) but pre-alpha!
Let's take a closer look at that Feature Voter. The one that's currently "In Development" is "new message board, forum and topic pages [which] will be faster...". So users of the Yuku system which is so painfully slow have voted for faster message boards. Quelle surprise...
Now bearing in mind ezboard once claimed that:
"Yuku has more than 14 million registered users and 500,000 communities. Yuku is growing by more than 200,000 registered users and 6,000 communities a month."
you'd expect them to have had many thousands of votes on this feature voter, wouldn't you?
No. In fourth place as I type, with a massive 34 votes is ... a feature to allow you "to import your message board from ezboard to Yuku".
Er, I thought Labatt had promised that back in March 2006 and yet now it's only on the 'maybe' list?
Incredible.
A bit of a follow-up to my earlier "nastygram", this one. I wrote:
"Now I know that ezboard has been carefully deleting sticky topics noting server downtime in the ezboard Help [sic] Forums but if you read their Server Status Forum you'll see that despite those deletions there are still a number of reports of servers being down. So either the ezboard customers are lying or mistaken or Labatt is."
Well either they've had another big data loss like they had last year or ezboard, Inc. has had a delete-fest in that forum, because only the last few days' posts remain. More window dressing, perhaps?
ezboard has confirmed that it is no longer developing the ezboard system and it's been said by the ezMods that fixing one bug in ezboard seems to create a new one. So instead, ezboard, Inc. has been concentrating its resources on the "is it beta or alpha status" Yuku.
But every so often, they go and have a fiddle anyway.
First, it was messing with the board layouts to include placeholders for adverts on Gold communities. This was apparently a bug.
But then they begin to show adverts on trial Gold boards.
And now they've fiddled with the boards so that clicking on a last poster's name in a forum's thread listing takes you to their profile (and if they've registered or migrated to Yuku it takes you to their Yuku profile page). This too is supposedly a bug that is to be fixed next week. Or is it?
How could such a bug be introduced? Well according to ezboard, it was a patch rolled out on 6 July. Don't forget they're only supposed to be supporting ezboard and not developing it or fixing bugs.
Of course, a cynic might think it was a ploy to get people to click through to Yuku profiles to try to generate some interest in it.
Talking of profiles, go and take a look at the wonderfully-named http://rob.u.yuku.com/ (try reading the part after the http part if you can't see what makes me laugh). He explains there who the users are who suddenly and automatically get added as 'Friends' to new Yuku profiles:
"Note:
A couple of us Yukus were added to your friends list when you opened your Yuku account. We're here to be available and help in the first days on Yuku."
So you'd expect him to have loads of Yuku 'friends' or "amigos" as he so cringingly refers to them. Er, no: "rob has 1869 amigos".
Only 1,869? I thought he announced that 25,000 ezboard users had come over up to a few weeks ago. Out of the 14,000,000 claimed users. And he only has 1,869 "amigos"...
Oh and by the way, there is a bug in that profile clicking bit on ezboard: if you click on a person's 'local' username, it takes you through to the 'global' username of the same name registered by someone else. Oh dear.
So a week ago, I mentioned that Labatt was boasting about the "near flawless account importing from ezboard to Yuku". I wrote:
"And that “near flawless” account importing? ezboard must have a different definition of “flawless” to mine. ezMish was boasting how she’d sorted 100 account migration support tickets in one day. 25,000 account migrations so far out of 14,000,000? Good grief… A 2% failure rate on that is 280,000 failures, with Mushy working 100 a day, it’ll only take 7½ years for her to clear them."
Well Labatt makes more mention of this "near flawless" system in his latest WordPress blog entry: yes, the post counts and creation dates can either be incorrect or not imported so this problem is to be fixed next week, apparently. He pleads:
"Please don’t send more help tickets in on these issues."
Maybe Mushy's being inundated already?
Have a little look here:
"Registrant:
ezboard Inc
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400x255
Domain Name: YUKUSUCKS.COM
Administrative Contact:
Labatt, Robert robertlabatt@ezboardcorp.com
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400x255
Technical Contact:
Labatt, Robert robertlabatt@ezboardcorp.com
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400x255
Record expires on 02-16-2007
Record created on 02-16-2006Domain servers in listed order:
NS0.DIRECTNIC.COM 204.251.10.100
NS1.DIRECTNIC.COM 206.251.177.2"
Even ezboard knows that Yuku sucks :) Mind you, they haven't decided where to point it. I also noticed today that someone has gone and registered the domain name ezboardsucks.com but that's currently pointing to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard
As the domain has been registered throught one of those proxy registration companies, it (probably) can't be traced. I'm a tad concerned, though, that the registrant could point it at one of my blogs or indeed at Sleazyboard and then ezboard would have another go at screaming "litigation" at my ISP like they did before. There's no way of telling if ezboard, Inc. themselves have registered it: certainly Googling brings up references to ezboard, Inc. having had it once before.
Remember my previous post about adverts being shown on trial Gold ezboards?
Well, in answer to another customer query, ezboard has given more details as to why they decided to change the policy to show adverts:
"...Unfortunately, certain people were manipulating the system by using one Trial board for 30 days then moving on to a newly created Trial board, again and again, as a way to have an ezboard without paying for it in any way -- either by displaying advertising or by purchasing Gold. You can thank those dishonorable people for the ads on your Trial board..."
Well that explains that.
Er, wait a minute, let's look at that again. ezboard claims it is "the largest online community network on the planet". Elsewhere ezboard appears to claim to have 10 million "loyal, active and engaged" users and over 500,000 active communities. ezboard also claimed at DEMOfall last year that:
"Yuku has more than 14 million registered users and 500,000 communities. Yuku is growing by more than 200,000 registered users and 6,000 communities a month."
So on that basis - as in September 2005 Yuku only really had a handful of alpha testers - ezboard should by the end of June 2006 have had well in excess of 15½ million registered users, going by ezboard's figures and claims.
And yet ezboard were apparently alerted to users setting up trial board after trial board every 30 days and decided that that was serious enough issue for them to change policy? Given that such "dishonourable people" would surely have killed off their new ezboards by continually moving their ezboards to new names and URLs, how significant could this have really been?
Mind you, it's also the case that they modified the ezboard code in early May 2006 to put in placeholders for advertisements at a time when they claimed not to be updating ezboard but just maintaining it pending the enforced move of all ezboards over to Yuku.
To be honest, I was a bit bored. Because ezboard, Inc.'s CEO Robert Labatt was upset by all those "nastygrams", he seems to have stopped updating the CEO WordPress Blog and his Yuku blog as well.
Oh well. Nothing for me to take the Mickey out of. But wait! There is!
You know how he wrote on 29 June that:
...here is our game plan over the next few months ... allow board migrations to begin ... I expect most of it to be done this summer…but we’ll see.
Well one of his "ezboard elves" is 'off-message' again.
Over on the ezboard Help [sic] Forums, one of those naughty elves writes:
We don't expect board migration to be possible until around the end of 2006.
Oh dear. Oh dear indeed. And that was posted a day after Santa Labatt posted in his Blog.
Or:
"ezboard staff need some friends..."
When you first register on MySpace, a profile, Tom, is automatically added to your list of "friends".
Not wanting to be outdone, ezboard, Inc. has decided that new registrations automatically have 10 profiles added to their "Friends" page (although from having a terribly slow nose around it might have come down to 5 now...). These people are some of/all the developers and staff at Yuku - including Robert Labatt - who obviously need to feel loved...
ezboard, Inc. has just introduced adverts on people's trial Gold Communities as of 28 June 2006.
I thought I'd mention it here because ezboard hasn't seen fit to formally announce that change anywhere: it slips in in a non-ezSupporter area.
So if you're fed up of intrusive and in some cases dodgy adverts on your ezboard community and decide to give Gold status a try, you won't notice the difference. Hmm. I wonder if ezboard are backing up trial Gold Communities? Regular readers will remember that whatever backups had been made were somehow lost by ezboard last year...
Of course, the change to have adverts on trial Gold Communities somewhat contradicts the clear statement here that "every Gold Community is 100% ad-free"...
